Sep 15 Brontez Purnell

Issue three’s curator is Brontez Purnell. Brontez is the author of the novels, Johnny Would You Like Me if My Dick Were Bigger? and Since I Laid My Burden Down. He has been publishing, performing, and curating in the Bay Area for more than ten years as founder of cult zine Fag School, frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, and the founder and choreographer of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. His most recent book won a 2018 Whiting Award for fiction.

When we asked Brontez to tell us a little about why he chose these particular books, he said: “So basically a lot of the writing and work I do deals with strong themes of isolation, struggle, the underdog, alongside grace and triumph. These are all books that I have read over the years that encapsulates these themes and in one way or another have influenced me and guided my voice as a writer.”

There is a game I used to play on tour with my band. We used to book shows in basements in lots of small towns, and that meant we spent a lot more time inside our van than not inside it. So we had to come up with ways to fill the time.

A puzzle piece (“sky, with a little bit of maple”) that a cleaning women from the titular story hunts for on her knees on green shag carpet. While she searches, she smokes and slides her ashtray along with her.

It was an Edenic time sexually: you could literally fuck whomever you wanted and the worst that could happen is that you’d get “the clap” or crabs, or wind up with a Reaganite prettyboy boring you about the stock market.

To see a familiar book outside of its usual context is like running into an elementary school teacher at the grocery store. The text is transformed, even multiplied, when I imagine the life it leads elsewhere.

I used to date a woman who was obsessed with vinyl pressing. She could rant for hours about how some records, depending on the location and year they were pressed, could become mimicries of the original recordings. It was something I would tease her about, tell her she was a snob, before blasting a track on my third-hand record player.